Hope you all enjoy it & if you are interested in the whole article here is the link, but I warn you this forum makes me hungry & wanting to make a trip to Chicago!
http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t= ... ior+bakery
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Italian Superior Bakery
Masi's Western Avenue Bread
© Antonius F. Volcinus de Montibus
If posed the question 'What is the main street of Chicago?' I suspect most people -- be they natives or knowledgeable visitors -- would think first of downtown and the Loop and suggest either State Street or nowadays especially Michigan Avenue as the most appropriate answer. The reasons for choosing one of those streets are obvious and correspond roughly to the criteria which incline people to think of Broadway or Fifth Avenue as the principal street of New York, or the Kurfürstendamm of Berlin, the Champs Elysées of Paris, the Dam of Amsterdam, Princes Street of Edinburgh, etc. Beautiful, even monumental architecture, fashionable shops and expensive eateries, proximity to major institutions and location in the city centre or downtown area. On all counts, Michigan Avenue from the Loop to the Magnificent Mile deserves its place alongside the other great streets of the world's major cities. But as much as I can enjoy the fashionable, the monumental and the cosmopolitan attractions of downtown, the most interesting and in a sense the most important street in all of Chicago is to my mind Western Avenue.
That Western Avenue is the longest street in the city, extending all the way from the northern city-boundary to its southern counterpart, is fairly widely known and I would guess that it must be one of the longer city streets in all the world. Given its central location, it forms a north-south axis that crosses all three of the major interstate highways that serve Chicago and so it functions as a crucial artery in the city's traffic patterns, a rôle which seems to be reflected in the presence of so many car dealerships and auto repair shops along virtually its entire length. But in between all of the car lots and muffler shops, one sees on this great avenue an amazing array of reflections of the history and current ethnic complexity of the city. Western Avenue is at once a Mexican street, an African-American street, a Polish street, a Puerto Rican street, a Pakistani street, a Korean street, an Irish street, a German street and an Italian street. And that list is likely incomplete.
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Like New York, Chicago once had a sufficiently large Italian population that it had not just one but several sizeable Italian neighbourhoods. On the northside, in the area where the Cabrini-Green projects were later built, was a predominantly Sicilian neighbourhood known as 'Little Hell', of which to my knowledge nothing remains. Over on the near northwest side, in West Town on Grand around Racine and Ogden, there is a now much diminished yet still quite visible Italian presence, which includes a number of restaurants and shops. Further west on Grand, around the intersections of Grand and Huron with Western Avenue is another and particularly little known Italian neighbourhood, primarily to the west of Western but represented on that street by a couple of funeral homes and other Italian-owned businesses. About four miles directly to the south of this enclave, down in the Heart of Chicago neighbourhood, on the east side of Western and more especially on Oakley, is the well-known northern Italian community with its cluster of restaurants.
The largest of the old Italian areas in Chicago was the one centred on and thus generally referred to as 'Taylor Street'. Back at the height of its expansion, this 'neighbourhood' -- really more an amalgam of many contiguous, smaller neighbourhoods -- extended across a narrow but long band between Harrison and Taylor running from around Halsted in the east all the way out past Western and, according to one older resident of the area, on to California and even Sacramento. That was in the 1920's and 30's and 40's, before the socioeconomic and demographic changes that came on the heels of World War II and, perhaps more importantly, the Near West Removals that were initiated under the auspices of Richard Daley Senior. Already in the 1940's, some of the Taylor Street Italians had started to move out of the Near West for places further west, such as the area around Grand and Harlem, and as they moved out, Mexicans began to move into parts of the Taylor Street corridor. Then, with the 'Removals', that is, the series of massive building projects of the highway circle, the University of Illinois Circle campus, the development of the Illinois Medical District, and the building of low-income housing projects, the core of the Taylor Street neighbourhood was swept away, with the displaced Italian population again heading westward to the Harlem Avenue area and beyond to the western and northwestern suburbs. Many of the Mexicans of Taylor Street moved a little ways south to the already strongly Mexican Pilsen neighbourhood.
Ultimately remaining of the Italian Taylor Street corridor are just two small enclaves which frame the intervening medical district, both of which have seen some rough times in recent decades but now are on the upswing. Indeed, the eastern enclave, which stretches from Morgan to Ashland and is now commonly referred to as 'Taylor Street' or even 'Little Italy', has a thriving and still expanding (through increasingly less Italian) cluster of restaurants, as well as an expanding and ever more valuable real estate market: houses in the neighbourhood which sell for well more than a half and now even well more than a whole million dollars are increasingly common. Though a certain noteworthy portion of the old Italian population of the area still resides there, the neighbourhood can hardly still be considered an overwhelmingly Italian one, despite all the restaurants that seem to indicate that. But it is to a certain degree still an Italian neighbourhood and the presence of some Italian businesses such the salumeria, Conte di Savoia, Chiarugi's hardware store, and Scafuri's bakery, even if a good measure of their customers live elsewhere, bears witness to that fact.
To the west of 'Taylor Street' and the medical centre is, of course, more of Taylor Street and the other enclave that continues to have direct ties to the old, massive Italian neighbourhood that once stretched across Chicago?s Near West. This somewhat isolated area, as product of forced removals that took place under old man Daley, had no traditional name and so was given in more recent years the appellation, perhaps by inventive real estate agents, 'Tri-Taylor', which is intended to denote the triangle based on the commercial stretch of Taylor Street and formed by Harrison, Ogden and Western.
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Joyce
Thanks for the nice article 
